Tough call for Samsung boss

OUR LEGAL CORRESPONDENT

Kun-hee: Court quandary

New Delhi, April 2: The Supreme Court has stayed the arrest of Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung Electronics, for six weeks, provided he appears before a Ghaziabad magistrate court in a $1.4-million cheating case filed against him.

“The special leave petition is dismissed. However, the arrest warrant issued against the petitioner (Lee) shall not be executed for six weeks from today,” the court said.

Lee will have to appear before the local court and can seek bail and an exemption from further hearings, the apex court ruled.

Though the order was passed on Monday, it was uploaded on the Supreme Court’s official website today.

A bench of justices Chandramauli K. Prasad and Pinaki Chandra Ghose passed the order on the appeal filed by Lee challenging the arrest warrants issued against him by the Ghaziabad court.

The Allahabad High Court had earlier dismissed his plea following which he had appealed in the apex court.

The trial court had last month issued the arrest warrants against Lee for failing to appear before it despite repeated summons.

In a statement, Samsung said Lee had no connection with the case, which it said was related to a “multi-million dollar fraud scheme” perpetrated against a subsidiary in Dubai.

Samsung declined to comment on whether Lee would appear in court.

The dispute started in 2001-2002 when Ghaziabad-based shipment company JCE Consultancy signed a pact to supply products to Sky Impex Ltd, which was to transfer the products to Samsung Gulf Electronics, Dubai, court documents showed.

JCE Consultancy filed a criminal complaint in 2005, saying it had not received payment, and named the Samsung unit and Lee among the accused.